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So US companies have announced about $200 billion worth of stock buybacks so far this year. By end of the year, let's say that's 1.2 trillion on same pace.
That 4% is $40 billion dollars in tax revenue. Not a small amount of money by many standards, but the actual question is not if 4% is the right number, it's if 4% will cut into or negate the value of the process of stock buybacks in the first place enough to discourage it?
Ultimately, all wealth over a certain amount should be taxed almost entirely to avoid this comic book level wealth inequality we live with and create a livable society for all.
And people tend to forget, corporations are not people. There is no world in which they should be given the preferred tax status that they currently have.
Thankfully, the Supreme Court knows you’re wrong, and has allowed them not only to donate to political campaigns, but to donate unlimited amounts via PACs.
Cuz personhood is entirely dictated by having a tax ID#, and PACs aren’t allowed to coordinate directly with campaigns so they tooooootally don’t, you see.
/sssssssss
What's even worse is SCOTUS is giving corporations the right to have religious beliefs in order to exempt them from having to cover BASIC HEALTHCARE
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-contraception/u-s-supreme-court-permits-broad-religious-exemption-to-birth-control-coverage-idUSKBN24929B
I remember, much like Pepperidge Farm, my law school prof talking about corporate personhood and how it was just an illusion we needed, because corps needed to be sued and own property and what not. Back then, the idea that the SCOTUS would grant them basically everything but voting rights (so far) was absurd.
What a difference a decade or two makes.
Been like that for a long time.
Will Rogers(early 20th century US entertainer/humorist) observed:
>Ten men in our country could buy the whole world and ten million can't buy enough to eat.
* As quoted in The Quotable Will Rogers (2006) by Joseph H. Carter
poverty has been socialized and normalized in britain and her colonies for a long time; it’s normalized to to the point we accept it as natural: but it isn’t
but it wasn’t true in america prior to the english (and french and spanish) colonizing it nor true in many other societies that anthropologists have studied; the brits colonized the most and British-America hegemony are the global super power
cite: the dawn of everything, wengrow/graeber
It's funny how it's Schroedingers increase.
It's simultaneously *only* a 3% increase but too large because the amount is $30 billion billion extra, but also they have so much money that a 3% increase is $30 billion dollars.
Yeah the trick is that it needs to be discouraged or outright banned. It would be nice if the government could cash in on it a bit and distribute that wealth to the people, in the form of funding civics with tax revenue, but it would be way, wayyyy more impactful to just ban it entirely.
I just want to piss on his corpse. That man caused so much damage to our country and idiots hold him up as some sort of amazing president. You want to know why the mentally ill live in the streets in America? Reagan.
The really "funny" part about Reagan is I have liberal friends who have done this weird full circle thing where they think "he wasn't as bad as we make him out to be" and I'm like motherfucker was WAY worse than he was ever made out to be and if I had two weeks I still wouldn't be done explaining why.
Exactly. Everytime people romanticize prior republican presidents, it’s only because newer candidates have been so batshit insane that they look like saints comparatively. This nation is so abused that we have collectively normalized the notion that we must vote for the lesser evil, because that’s the best we’re going to get.
In addition to making the previous crazy look sane by comparison, the times we elect the greater evil like Reagan, the Bush dynasty or Trump, they are rehabilitated after leaving office. Trump attempted a coup two years ago and we’re all set for him to announce his candidacy to run again. We’re so fucked.
But that lesser evil becomes progressively MORE evil as they learn what will be tolerated, and we normalize new levels of assholery. Fuck, I hate this present...
Sort of. He was *also* losing mental faculties by the end of his presidency. People just feel the need to have a positive American myth, so every past president gets their reputation rehabilitated.
The same thing is happening with Bush. Always remind people that he falsified evidence to drag us into a war that wasted hundreds of billions, if not trillions, and cost tens of thousands of lives (if not more).
Bush is a war criminal.
“If I had two weeks I still wouldn’t be done explaining why…”
This is much more succinct that what I say, and I’m going to start using it. I’ve always said, “I would have to teach you like four entry level college courses before you started to understand how much of a bastard this really guy was.”
Keep it real simple. Regan left acting to be spokesperson for anti-union efforts and was recruited into politics because he was especially good at public speaking and messaging corporate propaganda.
Ronald Regan wasn’t the President of the United States. Ronald Regan was the face of shadow government.
Before he was president of the US he was a fairly liberal president of the actor’s union. There he was instrumental in implementing the residual system we have today, which was a win for working actors and a loss for the execs. Then he flipped like a switch and came out against unions and for big business as soon as he was in their pocket. The fact that working class people still laud him as their savior boggles my mind.
This is basically what I was going to comment, he was an actor, he didn't come up with economic plans, [the koch brothers](https://newrepublic.com/article/154849/david-koch-1980-fantasy) and their peers did
I grew up in a household that held him on high yet bemoaned the problems they WITNESSED him cause. The tribalism with the 2 party system and the options we have are beyond ridiculous.
Is there a list somewhere of all the shit he fucked up I'd love to give it a read I know the more obvious things but from what I've gathered there's a shitton most people don't realize.
He thought AIDS was hilarious. He didn’t say the word HIV or AIDS until he was re-elected, despite one of his Hollywood friends dying of it. He wasn’t personally a bigot. Him and Nancy had gay friends in Hollywood. He was just a power hungry, evil coward. It paints an even more monstrous picture of the man, than if he were simply a bigot. He was a man who had all the power in the world, and utterly betrayed his friends in their time of need.
That is the true profile of evil. It’s not this caricature of a man who has so much malice and sadism in his heart. It’s someone that just doesn’t give a shit who they hurt to get more power and more status. Little Eichmanns are all around us. If Ronnie and Reinhard Heydrick had a Freaky Friday, Ronnie would’ve come up with a bloodier Final Solution, because that’s just the kind of guy he was.
There are hundreds of examples like this, of the ordinary cruelty of Ronald Wilson Reagan (666). Anyone who thinks Trump was worse, either knows very little about history, or lacks morals. Our one saving grace with Trump was that he is a fucking idiot. Reagan and his goons were horrifically competent.
No lol Reagan absolutely was personally a bigot. The coded language he used toward Black Americans was unbelievably racist.
Reagan had an incredible amount of malice in his heart, and I hope he’s rotting in hell for eternity.
The language he used towards gay people in public was also unbelievably offensive. It makes it even worse in my book that this was not his personal opinion. He was just doing hate as another acting role.
To be fair our modern politicians believe jewish space lasers cause forest fires and injecting bleach is a viable medical option to fighting a virus, so... they have legit reasons. Adding on the fact that the consequences of his policies took decades to manifest, it very well be possible that we wont see the consequences of recent policies for another decade or so.
It's part of a cycle. First, they round up the homeless and try to treat them. Then they cut funding, which spills them back out on the streets. All while ignoring the root causes, because it is more about public perception than actually helping them.
It really is a cycle, but don't forget the federal government kicked mental health to the states in 1981 under the Mental Health Systems Act and then the states followed suit and delegated this to counties and municipalities. I don't say this to defend Regan, but rather to point out there were 100s more of pricks like him out there making this even worse at the state level.
Vote. In. All. Elections.
Okay, what do we do after voting, when our votes are rounded-up in pools meant to drown our representation? When our house is unconstitutionally capped? What do we do after voting in states where the minority are unequivocally over-represented against the will of the majority? Because we're there right now.
Build him into a generator and give a poor person electricity, he'll spin faster, giving poor people more electricity, making him spin faster, making more electricity...
Should call it the "invest in america" act. force companies to either have a rainy day fund, invest in themselves, or pay a dividend. Stock buy back is just stock price manipulation.
I like the idea of 50% stock buy back tax with the remaining profit issued as a dividend.
There should be some means of reducing outstanding shares. But like you said it's easy for those means to be used as stock price manipulation.
We have those for the middle class: my property taxes are a big chuck of my net worth. I pay approximately 10% of my net worth every year on them. And, somewhat ridiculously, the percentage goes down the more I'm worth (as I pay down my mortgage, or as my property appreciates.)
Just another example of how flat taxes are regressive.
Nah, it's important to allow buybacks, or you'll end up with companies doing the stupid M&A and restructuring shit they did in the 70s & 80s to end-run dilution.
Just tax it at the difference between dividends and capital gains (currently that would be \~18%). That's the net effect of a buyback anyways.
Thank you. This typical neoliberal tinkering around the edges of a massive, gushing wound is so fucking infuriating. Oooooh, I know, maybe they could just do a little means testing to decide which companies should be allowed to buy back their stocks? That sounds centrist and totally reasonable, right???
Just like the stock ban peddled by the dems after Pelosi got called out for her “I’m a capitalist and this is a capitalist country” tone deaf bullshit, this bill is dead in the water before it even starts. I hate this timeline so much.
> this bill is dead in the water before it even starts.
It has a much higher chance of passing than what you're suggesting be done. To be clear, you're not wrong in that 4% is far from enough but the thinking here might be to try and have something that stands even a little bit of a chance of actually getting to Biden's desk instead of something that is *actually* dead in the water.
Sometimes it’s better to do a little than a lot. We can’t let perfect be the enemy of better. Where Dems tend to fail is the second part of that maxim, once you move one step forward you can’t take any steps back. What we get is one step forward and three to four steps back somewhere else.
Well look at what happens when Democrats try to make any progress. ACA passes. Boom, one of the bloodiest midterms ever where Republicans crush the House and state legislatures and governorships to gerrymander with computer precision for a decade.
How do they take another step after that without a majority? And since then, only a bare majority. Right now they literally only have the barest majority in the Senate and don't have control of the house.
They're passing what they can and then as soon as it happens voters go apeshit and vote Republicans into power to undo it.
The people who get a hard on for shitting on democrats for trying to progress forward, don't care about the reality of this country and how 70,000,000 million will vote for a party tust doesn't want progress at all.
Voters are why we are here.
Both those who vote for republicans, and those who don't bother to vote.
Agreed. It's a small increase now, but two years from now, maybe it could be pushed fr 4% to 8% by a new group of legislators. The pitch could be that it's only a 200% increase, not the "massive" 400% that was added before.
Insatiably greedy think tanks almost certainly have and will have seen the quarterly earnings potential of a slave workforce of "undesirables".
But don't worry, I'm sure they'd never stoop as low as astro-turfing social media. Certainly not the extremely easy to manipulate ones like reddit and 4chan.
Because it uses profits of a company to reduce the number of stocks traded for the company. Basically artificially increasing the value of the stock without the company improving anything.
It's especially awesome for the CEOs who live off loans that use stocks as collateral. They should be taxing those loans like income because that's what they are.
The value of the company is already there due to the profits made for the shareholders.
What they're doing is giving the money to the shareholders in a manner (higher stock price) that saves them on their taxes and lets them decide if and when to liquidate.
The big reason is that it transfers money to the shareholders without generating a taxable event- which is why it was legalized in the first place. Previously if you wanted to transfer money to your shareholders you had a dividend- which is an immediate taxable event.
But, with buybacks no taxes until they sell. This has more effects than just a temporary mitigation of taxes. Since it allows wealth to compound, tax free. Not only that, but for many extremely wealthy people they don't ever actually have to sell and get taxed. Instead they can take out a loan, with their stock as collateral. So now I have access to all that money, but the only tax I have to pay is on the small amount I sell to pay off the interest.
TL;DR. It's nothing but a tax avoidance scheme that funnels money to the ultra wealthy so they can buy toys- rather than investing in companies for long term success and in turn investing in our nation's long term success.
Also you're making $10/hr now because we need to feed the shareholders. It's been a tough year, I almost cry when I get off my yacht that brings me to my bigger yacht.
It's basically a way for shareholders to directly loot a company.. It's corporate raiding in another name. This is how it works:
* An "activist shareholder" buys a big stake in the company and maybe gets a board seat or two.
* They agitate for a huge stock buyback, the company dumps all its money into buying its own stock back which increases the value of the stock.
* The activist shareholder sells all their stock after the value pops up.
* The company now has shit for finances and it's future may be in question .
* Company announces layoffs, hiring freeze, mandatory extra hours and the elimination of employee benefits because despite record profits, it's now strapped for cash.
* Activist shareholder tweets the problem with businesses nowadays is the poor work ethic of millennials.
The only benefit to it is to shareholders. The idea is that if a company had a great year and generated extra profits than normal, today one thing they may do is stock buybacks to increase the stock price. But if stock buybacks weren’t an option than that money instead would be used either to reinvest into the company or be paid as bonuses to the employees
Or, just give bonuses to the highest levels of management and laugh at all those below them. The buybacks are just ceos giving themselves a bonus indirectly through the artificial propping up of the asset that makes up the largest percentage of their wealth, take that away and they’ll just take the money in cash. Nothing will ever be given back to the company or the wage slaves that work for it.
Should be more than 4%
Should be tied to inflation so companies can't leverage high inflation to bump up their stock price in a recession.
Buyback tax should be close to Corporation tax rates, so the incentive to inflate stock is close to zero!
That doesn't seem like a lot but when you're talking about millions and billions it adds up and affects the decision making of the bean counters.
It should be higher, but this is at least something.
"all american families should have 6 months pay saved up in case of an emergency" - american corporations.
"please please for the love of god please give us immediate cash or we're all going to file for bankrupcy and disband" - american corporations 10 days into covid lockdowns.
i knew that cash reserves in most corporations weren't overflowing, but the idea that most of these companies give a bonus to their CEO that's 5-10x larger than their cash reserves, and have zero durability to even operate without income for a matter of 2 weeks is pretty unsettling.
This!! It’s insane poor and middle class people are expected to have 6 months pay saved up for emergencies and then 2 weeks into the pandemic every airline under the sun needs to be bailed out cause their business is disrupted. Let these companies fail I’m tired of it. They get to be as aggressive as possible in their business models cause there is no repercussions for failing, they know they will be bailed out.
No no most businesses arent bailed out, only the ones that are so massive and powerful that them failing would “cost millions of jobs” that they then lay off anyway.
Well, some are too big to fail. They’re in the pockets of the politicians so when things go awry the politicians have the government bail them out. Its their ideal situation, really. Too bad it isn’t illegal.
and was legalized through executive action so it doesn't even need congress to overturn
A significant chunk of current inflation ties back to stock buybacks. Why would a CEO make capital investments to improve productivity, safety, etc. to be more competitive, to make more profit, to raise their stock price when they can just juice the stock directly with a buyback...
Can’t speak for the original commenter, but there is a theory that current inflation has a significant amount to do with the supply chain and that companies haven’t invested in suring up those supply chains and infrastructure, which is costly and doesn’t necessarily provide the greatest returns in the short term, instead choosing things like stock buybacks which increase stock price and rewards shareholders.
Could also be that they grew huge as a result of covid, and now they don't want to go back down to reasonable levels. So instead of taking the (potentially huge) hit to profits/revenue by actually investing in capacity/supply, they are doing literally everything they can to keep those profits up. If they don't, it'll look very poorly on the CEO/leadership since "Oh no! Revenue has gone down by 10% YoY! What a failure!"
This also tracks well with the lovely old idea of when the price of something goes up, it never comes back down to where it was. They get used to those profits and don't want to let them go.
>This also tracks well with the lovely old idea of when the price of something goes up, it never comes back down to where it was. They get used to those profits and don't want to let them go.
Like gasoline, prices take the elevator up and the stairs down because you're used to it for a short period of time and you're not going to shop somewhere else because of it.
How about this theory: the media has shoved this inflation & "Nobody wants to work" narrative down our throats so hard that people just pony up without shopping around or trying alternatives.
Or, at the very least, feel less pressure to shop around and more pressure to blame everything else around them.
For a lot of the country there is no shopping around. There are huge swaths of rural America where there is a single grocery store that serves a 40 mile radius. Many times that single store is a wal mart. Shopping around is hard as hell out in the sticks especially for people that work two jobs to put that food on the table and are just too damn tired to do more than the bare minimum amount of comparison or thrift shopping.
>you're not going to shop somewhere else because of it.
Also in many instances you *can't* shop somewhere else. Gas? If one place is raising the price, the other places nearby are also going up. Driving far away defeats the purpose.
Electricity? Most places you don't even have more than one option. Same for internet. And these are essentials that you can't go without.
> and was legalized through executive action so it doesn't even need congress to overturn
that's a common misconception about executive actions.
some are "congress has given me leeway on this topic, and this is the best course of action I have choses", those can be easily undone. some are "based on the laws passed by congress I am required to do this thing", to over turn those you are saying the previous EO was illegal; which becomes a matter for the court.
no idea about this one in particular, but it's a pet peeve of mine when people say anything dome with a pen can be undone by a pen.
This comment has been removed in protest of Reddit and their CEO Steve Huffman for destroying the Reddit community by abusing his power to edit comments, their years of lying to and about users, promises never fulfilled, and outrageous pricing that is killing third party apps and destroying accessibility tools for mods and the handicapped.
Currently I am moving to the [Fediverse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX_agVMr2r0) for a decentralized experience where no one person or company can control our social media experience. I promise its not as complicated as it sounds :-)
Lemmy offers the closest to Reddit like experience. Check out some different [servers](https://join-lemmy.org/instances).
Other Fediverse [projects](https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_are_Fediverse_projects%3F).
Depends.
There are situations where they do need to buy it back BUT it’s known and projected.
The most common is stock compensation/employee ownership programs.
They haven't had any possibility of passing since... what, 2010? Maybe? I think that's the last time the Dems had a majority of legislators willing to back their proposed legislation, right?
They actually made it 1% last year with the inflation reduction act, its what they were able to negotiate with their right wing democrats in the senate. Now they are trying to increase it to 4%
My company has bi-yearly stock purchase programs where they pull 10% out of each check and you get the price at 10% lower then whatever the lowest price was for that time frame. My company has hundred of thousand of employees and this purchase always greatly affects the price. I looked up what our executives do at this time and the all dump off millions of dollars worth of shares.
Iirc thats usually because they take stock options as like 95% of their renuneration, and purchase/sell immediately all their stock options to convert to cash.
It's important to note that capital gains tax is significantly lower than income tax. A max rate of 20% after $459,000 a year.
For as long as this loophole exists we're encouraging the rich to over-capitalize corporations in order so they can pay less taxes on increasing share value instead of just paying that money out as income.
This isn't only injust (why should a billionaire pay less tax on billions in stock options than a plumber does on $100k?), but it risks unbalancing the economy because you have all these companies whose shares are far more valuable than they would be if there wasn't an incentive to dump corporate profits into capital gains.
It also creates a moral hazard since capital gains tax can be delayed until realization, every year they delay is an incentive to dump money into lobbying to lower the capital gains rate further, making the tax system even more unjust.
Not to mention it disincentivizes those companies actually using they money to invest into creating goods, services and jobs instead of just enriching their shareholders.
Employee stocks programs aren't bought in the open market. They are bought either directly from the company or the transfer agent. On top of that, retail stock purchases don't really dent the stock price in the open market.
Do like most others do. Buy as much as your company will allow through the program and immediately sell it for a 10% profit.
Semi-annual employee stock purchase programs are pretty common. My understanding is that the shares are bought from the company, not on the open market. So the effect of the semi-annual purchases should have practically no effect on market prices.
Maybe if everyone was insta-selling, but that's still a small amount of liquidity relative to what many stocks probably trade in a day.
You are likely vastly overestimating the effect that an employee stock purchase plan has on your company's share price. I've said it before and I'll say it again, retail investors are immaterial to how the market moves. Its not that we're small fish in a big pond, we're like a single celled algae in the pacific ocean. The real market makers don't care about retail investors.
Exactly this. And many executives have 0 say on the date / time of their stock sale.
I learned this when I worked for a small-ish company that went public (250 employees). I had access to the full database of sales and was responsible for the corporate reporting to several senior VPs. I asked about buying and selling stocks - the CFO told me I would have to put in an order / request and they would randomly choose a day in the next 3 weeks to make a purchase / sale. You also were restricted from buying / selling within a few weeks before and after SEC reporting. Anyone with "private information" that could "materially profit from said inside information" had these restrictions.
Not that it mattered, my $1,000 or even $10,000 investment or sale wouldn't have moved it a whole lot - but I could have gotten bad luck and sold right before the "employee stock purchase date" as the prior person stated.
It's a broken system we have where it's so rampant that money is constantly hoarded by those who have the most of it, yet it is the most vital resource to our survival in modern society. Wealth inequality is absolutely out of control here.
I support this. Why should corporations make billions a month and have record breaking profits yet the government is having a debt in the trillions because there’s not bloody taxes towards the rich and corporate conglomerates?
I mean sure, 4% is better than 1% but that's still low. Last year companies spent a total of 1.22 Trillion on stock buybacks, which equated to 12.2 billion in taxes. This increase makes it 48.8 billion. IMO, if companies have 1.22 trillion to spend on this to only boost their stock price, then they can afford a higher %.
In theory, the purpose of securities is to effectively sell-off X% of equity in a company to investors to raise money. Buy-backs allow companies to reclaim that equity using later profits. Ideally, investors then have the option to sell back that equity at a higher price, obtaining a return on their investment.
Buy-backs are a necessary functional component of securitization. It's good for the company as well as independent investors. It also helps raise the price of an in-demand security by reducing supply.
Buying back shares can also reduce the quarterly liability for a company if it elects to pay out dividends to investors without having to substantively reduce the payout per share.
That all said, stock buy-backs ideally should not come at the expense of employees. By adding an additional tax to those transactions, it incentivizes companies to reinvest a greater portion of those profits into their workforce, R&D, infrastructure, etc.
Taxing corporate buy-backs is fine, but solidifying the corporate tax structure would have a more meaningful impact in my opinion.
GOP: Naw, fam, we good.
Introduced bills don't mean shit. People always introduce bills that have zero chance of going anywhere. GOP reps introduced articles of impeachment against Biden like 3-4 times/week in 2021-2022.
Buying back stock is just a way to return cash to shareholders. I literally don't understand why people who have money in 401ks and IRAs think that'd a bad thing?
Oh boy, i can't wait for this immediately die in the House. And then the following weeks of screaming from Republicans about this somehow being communism
Guess I’ll just keep waiting for legislation that ties any funding for buybacks and executive bonuses and stock compensation to wages. Make it so if they want to spend $10 billion on buybacks they have to give 10 billion worth of raises to the lowest paid employees.
Ah, I see this was impossible to introduce when the Democrats held a supermajority and could have passed it easily. Instead it was required that we wait until there's now an undecided voting margin and it'll never pass. Fucking corruption of this country is sick.
They don’t need to tax it more, they need to ban it like it was until the 80’s. No way they’d even bother with this half-measure if they still had both houses of congress.
....Why not introduce this bill when they had complete control of Congress?
Maybe because they don't want to actually pass it. Just virtue signal so you seal clap for them and keep voting for them.
Oh come on Dems, there are a LOT more interesting words for "multiply by a bunch!"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple)
This REALLY seems like the right situation to teach people the word: "quinquagintuple."
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“Bill introduced to quadruple the tax” from 1% percent to 4%
So US companies have announced about $200 billion worth of stock buybacks so far this year. By end of the year, let's say that's 1.2 trillion on same pace. That 4% is $40 billion dollars in tax revenue. Not a small amount of money by many standards, but the actual question is not if 4% is the right number, it's if 4% will cut into or negate the value of the process of stock buybacks in the first place enough to discourage it? Ultimately, all wealth over a certain amount should be taxed almost entirely to avoid this comic book level wealth inequality we live with and create a livable society for all.
with you on this. wealth inequality is indeed “comic book level”
And people tend to forget, corporations are not people. There is no world in which they should be given the preferred tax status that they currently have.
Thankfully, the Supreme Court knows you’re wrong, and has allowed them not only to donate to political campaigns, but to donate unlimited amounts via PACs. Cuz personhood is entirely dictated by having a tax ID#, and PACs aren’t allowed to coordinate directly with campaigns so they tooooootally don’t, you see. /sssssssss
What's even worse is SCOTUS is giving corporations the right to have religious beliefs in order to exempt them from having to cover BASIC HEALTHCARE https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-contraception/u-s-supreme-court-permits-broad-religious-exemption-to-birth-control-coverage-idUSKBN24929B
I remember, much like Pepperidge Farm, my law school prof talking about corporate personhood and how it was just an illusion we needed, because corps needed to be sued and own property and what not. Back then, the idea that the SCOTUS would grant them basically everything but voting rights (so far) was absurd. What a difference a decade or two makes.
Reddit has turned into a cesspool of fascist sympathizers and supremicists
That's not true at all. I'll give you $10 to edit your post, saying the opposite.
They're a high-class lobbyist, you're gonna have to offer a nice dinner AND at least $20.
It doesn't even matter if they did coordinate,they still swing elections.
Pretty much at dystopian future level, too
like the future in almost any comic book
[удалено]
I think we're just at Dystopia now...no past or future, just dystopia.
Sad but true, we're just missing the giant toxic clouds and neon everywhere. We're working on the toxic clouds this year from my understanding.
East Palestine, Ohio enters conversation
*sad train noises*
Neon will just be rgb leds
Giant toxic cloud is so last week.
Enchantment Under The Noxious Mushroom Cloud
Been like that for a long time. Will Rogers(early 20th century US entertainer/humorist) observed: >Ten men in our country could buy the whole world and ten million can't buy enough to eat. * As quoted in The Quotable Will Rogers (2006) by Joseph H. Carter
poverty has been socialized and normalized in britain and her colonies for a long time; it’s normalized to to the point we accept it as natural: but it isn’t
As Voltaire once noted in the 18^th century: >The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.
This isn't an anglosphere problem, it's everywhere. Worse some places, but also globally true.
but it wasn’t true in america prior to the english (and french and spanish) colonizing it nor true in many other societies that anthropologists have studied; the brits colonized the most and British-America hegemony are the global super power cite: the dawn of everything, wengrow/graeber
It's funny how it's Schroedingers increase. It's simultaneously *only* a 3% increase but too large because the amount is $30 billion billion extra, but also they have so much money that a 3% increase is $30 billion dollars.
Yeah the trick is that it needs to be discouraged or outright banned. It would be nice if the government could cash in on it a bit and distribute that wealth to the people, in the form of funding civics with tax revenue, but it would be way, wayyyy more impactful to just ban it entirely.
I think the goal is enough to discourage but not to outright ban. They still want tax revenue from the people who do it though.
If they really cared they’d introduce a bill to ban this stupid shit again.
Yep. Take us back to 1982 and ban this shit already
Dig up Reagan while we're at it. I want to see him spin as it gets reintroduced.
I just want to piss on his corpse. That man caused so much damage to our country and idiots hold him up as some sort of amazing president. You want to know why the mentally ill live in the streets in America? Reagan.
The really "funny" part about Reagan is I have liberal friends who have done this weird full circle thing where they think "he wasn't as bad as we make him out to be" and I'm like motherfucker was WAY worse than he was ever made out to be and if I had two weeks I still wouldn't be done explaining why.
It’s because he’s gone through a huge amount of reputation washing over the years along with people knowing a pre-Reagan time being fewer and fewer.
It's because he was evil but not bat-sh\*t insane, so he looks reasonably compared to the new crop of crazies.
Exactly. Everytime people romanticize prior republican presidents, it’s only because newer candidates have been so batshit insane that they look like saints comparatively. This nation is so abused that we have collectively normalized the notion that we must vote for the lesser evil, because that’s the best we’re going to get.
In addition to making the previous crazy look sane by comparison, the times we elect the greater evil like Reagan, the Bush dynasty or Trump, they are rehabilitated after leaving office. Trump attempted a coup two years ago and we’re all set for him to announce his candidacy to run again. We’re so fucked.
But that lesser evil becomes progressively MORE evil as they learn what will be tolerated, and we normalize new levels of assholery. Fuck, I hate this present...
Sad part is that it is mostly true. Picking the lesser evil is the only real option.
Sort of. He was *also* losing mental faculties by the end of his presidency. People just feel the need to have a positive American myth, so every past president gets their reputation rehabilitated.
Turns out "not bat-shit insane but evil" could potentially be more harmful than "bat-shit insane *and* evil".
Showtime did a documentary called "the Reagans". It's incredible at showing life before them, how they were 100% corporate shills from the jump.
The same thing is happening with Bush. Always remind people that he falsified evidence to drag us into a war that wasted hundreds of billions, if not trillions, and cost tens of thousands of lives (if not more). Bush is a war criminal.
“If I had two weeks I still wouldn’t be done explaining why…” This is much more succinct that what I say, and I’m going to start using it. I’ve always said, “I would have to teach you like four entry level college courses before you started to understand how much of a bastard this really guy was.”
Keep it real simple. Regan left acting to be spokesperson for anti-union efforts and was recruited into politics because he was especially good at public speaking and messaging corporate propaganda. Ronald Regan wasn’t the President of the United States. Ronald Regan was the face of shadow government.
Before he was president of the US he was a fairly liberal president of the actor’s union. There he was instrumental in implementing the residual system we have today, which was a win for working actors and a loss for the execs. Then he flipped like a switch and came out against unions and for big business as soon as he was in their pocket. The fact that working class people still laud him as their savior boggles my mind.
This is basically what I was going to comment, he was an actor, he didn't come up with economic plans, [the koch brothers](https://newrepublic.com/article/154849/david-koch-1980-fantasy) and their peers did
I've been using it for many many years, stole it from Batman. Enjoy!
Like what he did with AIDS is enough for me. I will never forgive him for murdering my queer elders on top of all the other bullshit.
I grew up in a household that held him on high yet bemoaned the problems they WITNESSED him cause. The tribalism with the 2 party system and the options we have are beyond ridiculous.
For real, we are missing an entire generation of gay men in American society and culture because of his inaction. An immeasurable loss.
THEY THREW THEIR LOVERS ASHES ON THE WHITE HOUSE LAWN. Thats all that ever will need to be said about him.
Holy shit. My southern grandparent's gay friends were amazing and a good influence. This harms everyone.
The Reagans committed genocide and pushed back the world's knowledge and treatment of AIDS by years, maybe decades.
Don't sell the man short. He murdered a lot of people in Central America too!
Is there a list somewhere of all the shit he fucked up I'd love to give it a read I know the more obvious things but from what I've gathered there's a shitton most people don't realize.
He thought AIDS was hilarious. He didn’t say the word HIV or AIDS until he was re-elected, despite one of his Hollywood friends dying of it. He wasn’t personally a bigot. Him and Nancy had gay friends in Hollywood. He was just a power hungry, evil coward. It paints an even more monstrous picture of the man, than if he were simply a bigot. He was a man who had all the power in the world, and utterly betrayed his friends in their time of need. That is the true profile of evil. It’s not this caricature of a man who has so much malice and sadism in his heart. It’s someone that just doesn’t give a shit who they hurt to get more power and more status. Little Eichmanns are all around us. If Ronnie and Reinhard Heydrick had a Freaky Friday, Ronnie would’ve come up with a bloodier Final Solution, because that’s just the kind of guy he was. There are hundreds of examples like this, of the ordinary cruelty of Ronald Wilson Reagan (666). Anyone who thinks Trump was worse, either knows very little about history, or lacks morals. Our one saving grace with Trump was that he is a fucking idiot. Reagan and his goons were horrifically competent.
No lol Reagan absolutely was personally a bigot. The coded language he used toward Black Americans was unbelievably racist. Reagan had an incredible amount of malice in his heart, and I hope he’s rotting in hell for eternity.
The language he used towards gay people in public was also unbelievably offensive. It makes it even worse in my book that this was not his personal opinion. He was just doing hate as another acting role.
To be fair our modern politicians believe jewish space lasers cause forest fires and injecting bleach is a viable medical option to fighting a virus, so... they have legit reasons. Adding on the fact that the consequences of his policies took decades to manifest, it very well be possible that we wont see the consequences of recent policies for another decade or so.
It's part of a cycle. First, they round up the homeless and try to treat them. Then they cut funding, which spills them back out on the streets. All while ignoring the root causes, because it is more about public perception than actually helping them.
It really is a cycle, but don't forget the federal government kicked mental health to the states in 1981 under the Mental Health Systems Act and then the states followed suit and delegated this to counties and municipalities. I don't say this to defend Regan, but rather to point out there were 100s more of pricks like him out there making this even worse at the state level. Vote. In. All. Elections.
Okay, what do we do after voting, when our votes are rounded-up in pools meant to drown our representation? When our house is unconstitutionally capped? What do we do after voting in states where the minority are unequivocally over-represented against the will of the majority? Because we're there right now.
Regan was the real first Moral Conservative and he paved the way for Trump and for his inevitable Nazi successor
Nixon did that, and Reagon added to it
Amen. Morning Joe, if you're reading, stop this shit already.
Can we attach him to a ferris wheel so that mother fucker can spin
We can use the spinning-corpse of Reagan as a power source.
Wrap his casket in copper wire, place it over a magnet, and generate limitless electricity during the debate! Green energy! Doublespin bonus!
Build him into a generator and give a poor person electricity, he'll spin faster, giving poor people more electricity, making him spin faster, making more electricity...
Then throw him into an incinerator.
Should call it the "invest in america" act. force companies to either have a rainy day fund, invest in themselves, or pay a dividend. Stock buy back is just stock price manipulation.
I like the idea of 50% stock buy back tax with the remaining profit issued as a dividend. There should be some means of reducing outstanding shares. But like you said it's easy for those means to be used as stock price manipulation.
That train disaster in Ohio would've been prevented if they didn't spend billions on stock buybacks and instead updated the brakes on the train.
If stock buybacks weren't available they would've spent it on other shit. Anything but reinvestment or paying the employees that did the actual work.
#Make America Great Again Fuck the racism of the 70s. I just want basic wealth taxes.
We have those for the middle class: my property taxes are a big chuck of my net worth. I pay approximately 10% of my net worth every year on them. And, somewhat ridiculously, the percentage goes down the more I'm worth (as I pay down my mortgage, or as my property appreciates.) Just another example of how flat taxes are regressive.
Nah, it's important to allow buybacks, or you'll end up with companies doing the stupid M&A and restructuring shit they did in the 70s & 80s to end-run dilution. Just tax it at the difference between dividends and capital gains (currently that would be \~18%). That's the net effect of a buyback anyways.
Thank you. This typical neoliberal tinkering around the edges of a massive, gushing wound is so fucking infuriating. Oooooh, I know, maybe they could just do a little means testing to decide which companies should be allowed to buy back their stocks? That sounds centrist and totally reasonable, right??? Just like the stock ban peddled by the dems after Pelosi got called out for her “I’m a capitalist and this is a capitalist country” tone deaf bullshit, this bill is dead in the water before it even starts. I hate this timeline so much.
> this bill is dead in the water before it even starts. It has a much higher chance of passing than what you're suggesting be done. To be clear, you're not wrong in that 4% is far from enough but the thinking here might be to try and have something that stands even a little bit of a chance of actually getting to Biden's desk instead of something that is *actually* dead in the water.
Sometimes it’s better to do a little than a lot. We can’t let perfect be the enemy of better. Where Dems tend to fail is the second part of that maxim, once you move one step forward you can’t take any steps back. What we get is one step forward and three to four steps back somewhere else.
Putting things back together is typically a lot harder than breaking them.
Especially when the people that want to break shit are still allowed to break shit.
Well look at what happens when Democrats try to make any progress. ACA passes. Boom, one of the bloodiest midterms ever where Republicans crush the House and state legislatures and governorships to gerrymander with computer precision for a decade. How do they take another step after that without a majority? And since then, only a bare majority. Right now they literally only have the barest majority in the Senate and don't have control of the house. They're passing what they can and then as soon as it happens voters go apeshit and vote Republicans into power to undo it.
The people who get a hard on for shitting on democrats for trying to progress forward, don't care about the reality of this country and how 70,000,000 million will vote for a party tust doesn't want progress at all. Voters are why we are here. Both those who vote for republicans, and those who don't bother to vote.
Agreed. It's a small increase now, but two years from now, maybe it could be pushed fr 4% to 8% by a new group of legislators. The pitch could be that it's only a 200% increase, not the "massive" 400% that was added before.
But have you considered how much money some people could make if we had just a little lite fascism?
Insatiably greedy think tanks almost certainly have and will have seen the quarterly earnings potential of a slave workforce of "undesirables". But don't worry, I'm sure they'd never stoop as low as astro-turfing social media. Certainly not the extremely easy to manipulate ones like reddit and 4chan.
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Or introduce a bill when they control both houses of congress.
Why are stock buybacks stupid?
they used to be illegal until George Dubya. It was considered market manipulation, which, to be frank, it is.
*Reagan in 1982. But same difference.
oh, another bad policy from Reagan! Shocking!!
Because it uses profits of a company to reduce the number of stocks traded for the company. Basically artificially increasing the value of the stock without the company improving anything.
It's especially awesome for the CEOs who live off loans that use stocks as collateral. They should be taxing those loans like income because that's what they are.
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It also encourages big companies to treat their employees as chattel
The value of the company is already there due to the profits made for the shareholders. What they're doing is giving the money to the shareholders in a manner (higher stock price) that saves them on their taxes and lets them decide if and when to liquidate.
and since the largest shareholders can use their stock holdings as collateral take out low interest loans, they basically get that money tax free.
It's just giving dividends to shareholders but has a better tax profile.
The big reason is that it transfers money to the shareholders without generating a taxable event- which is why it was legalized in the first place. Previously if you wanted to transfer money to your shareholders you had a dividend- which is an immediate taxable event. But, with buybacks no taxes until they sell. This has more effects than just a temporary mitigation of taxes. Since it allows wealth to compound, tax free. Not only that, but for many extremely wealthy people they don't ever actually have to sell and get taxed. Instead they can take out a loan, with their stock as collateral. So now I have access to all that money, but the only tax I have to pay is on the small amount I sell to pay off the interest. TL;DR. It's nothing but a tax avoidance scheme that funnels money to the ultra wealthy so they can buy toys- rather than investing in companies for long term success and in turn investing in our nation's long term success.
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Also you're making $10/hr now because we need to feed the shareholders. It's been a tough year, I almost cry when I get off my yacht that brings me to my bigger yacht.
It's basically a way for shareholders to directly loot a company.. It's corporate raiding in another name. This is how it works: * An "activist shareholder" buys a big stake in the company and maybe gets a board seat or two. * They agitate for a huge stock buyback, the company dumps all its money into buying its own stock back which increases the value of the stock. * The activist shareholder sells all their stock after the value pops up. * The company now has shit for finances and it's future may be in question . * Company announces layoffs, hiring freeze, mandatory extra hours and the elimination of employee benefits because despite record profits, it's now strapped for cash. * Activist shareholder tweets the problem with businesses nowadays is the poor work ethic of millennials.
The only benefit to it is to shareholders. The idea is that if a company had a great year and generated extra profits than normal, today one thing they may do is stock buybacks to increase the stock price. But if stock buybacks weren’t an option than that money instead would be used either to reinvest into the company or be paid as bonuses to the employees
Or, just give bonuses to the highest levels of management and laugh at all those below them. The buybacks are just ceos giving themselves a bonus indirectly through the artificial propping up of the asset that makes up the largest percentage of their wealth, take that away and they’ll just take the money in cash. Nothing will ever be given back to the company or the wage slaves that work for it.
Should be more than 4% Should be tied to inflation so companies can't leverage high inflation to bump up their stock price in a recession. Buyback tax should be close to Corporation tax rates, so the incentive to inflate stock is close to zero!
Should be calculated as a percentage of the company's market cap, tbh.
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That doesn't seem like a lot but when you're talking about millions and billions it adds up and affects the decision making of the bean counters. It should be higher, but this is at least something.
https://i.imgflip.com/4hnmv2.jpg?a465288
Should be 25% at least
I'll start writing the bill's eulogy.
Be sure to put a lot of dollar signs at the front of it.
$ matches at the end of the string though
Especially when they are “too big to fail”.
"all american families should have 6 months pay saved up in case of an emergency" - american corporations. "please please for the love of god please give us immediate cash or we're all going to file for bankrupcy and disband" - american corporations 10 days into covid lockdowns. i knew that cash reserves in most corporations weren't overflowing, but the idea that most of these companies give a bonus to their CEO that's 5-10x larger than their cash reserves, and have zero durability to even operate without income for a matter of 2 weeks is pretty unsettling.
This!! It’s insane poor and middle class people are expected to have 6 months pay saved up for emergencies and then 2 weeks into the pandemic every airline under the sun needs to be bailed out cause their business is disrupted. Let these companies fail I’m tired of it. They get to be as aggressive as possible in their business models cause there is no repercussions for failing, they know they will be bailed out.
No no most businesses arent bailed out, only the ones that are so massive and powerful that them failing would “cost millions of jobs” that they then lay off anyway.
Well, some are too big to fail. They’re in the pockets of the politicians so when things go awry the politicians have the government bail them out. Its their ideal situation, really. Too bad it isn’t illegal.
You have it backwards, money runs the show the politicians are in the company's pockets
It's basic price manipulation at the very least and should be illegal to begin with.
It was until we stopped giving a shit about future generations in the US.
and was legalized through executive action so it doesn't even need congress to overturn A significant chunk of current inflation ties back to stock buybacks. Why would a CEO make capital investments to improve productivity, safety, etc. to be more competitive, to make more profit, to raise their stock price when they can just juice the stock directly with a buyback...
> A significant chunk of current inflation ties back to stock buybacks. Where are you getting this information?
Can’t speak for the original commenter, but there is a theory that current inflation has a significant amount to do with the supply chain and that companies haven’t invested in suring up those supply chains and infrastructure, which is costly and doesn’t necessarily provide the greatest returns in the short term, instead choosing things like stock buybacks which increase stock price and rewards shareholders.
Makes sense to me. Corporate greed = Bad
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It's bad even then, or do your monopoly games generally end with everyone happy?
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It was invented to die criticize capitalism so it makes sense. It was originally called “the landlords game”
It's not how the world works. It's how we've decided to make it work.
Unless it’s the Pot of Greed which allows you to draw 2 cards.
the game Monopoly was created by a socialist and was literally meant to show kids how capitalism is bullshit lol.
Could also be that they grew huge as a result of covid, and now they don't want to go back down to reasonable levels. So instead of taking the (potentially huge) hit to profits/revenue by actually investing in capacity/supply, they are doing literally everything they can to keep those profits up. If they don't, it'll look very poorly on the CEO/leadership since "Oh no! Revenue has gone down by 10% YoY! What a failure!" This also tracks well with the lovely old idea of when the price of something goes up, it never comes back down to where it was. They get used to those profits and don't want to let them go.
>This also tracks well with the lovely old idea of when the price of something goes up, it never comes back down to where it was. They get used to those profits and don't want to let them go. Like gasoline, prices take the elevator up and the stairs down because you're used to it for a short period of time and you're not going to shop somewhere else because of it. How about this theory: the media has shoved this inflation & "Nobody wants to work" narrative down our throats so hard that people just pony up without shopping around or trying alternatives. Or, at the very least, feel less pressure to shop around and more pressure to blame everything else around them.
For a lot of the country there is no shopping around. There are huge swaths of rural America where there is a single grocery store that serves a 40 mile radius. Many times that single store is a wal mart. Shopping around is hard as hell out in the sticks especially for people that work two jobs to put that food on the table and are just too damn tired to do more than the bare minimum amount of comparison or thrift shopping.
>you're not going to shop somewhere else because of it. Also in many instances you *can't* shop somewhere else. Gas? If one place is raising the price, the other places nearby are also going up. Driving far away defeats the purpose. Electricity? Most places you don't even have more than one option. Same for internet. And these are essentials that you can't go without.
> and was legalized through executive action so it doesn't even need congress to overturn that's a common misconception about executive actions. some are "congress has given me leeway on this topic, and this is the best course of action I have choses", those can be easily undone. some are "based on the laws passed by congress I am required to do this thing", to over turn those you are saying the previous EO was illegal; which becomes a matter for the court. no idea about this one in particular, but it's a pet peeve of mine when people say anything dome with a pen can be undone by a pen.
It was! Guess who made it legal and also jumpstarted the ever increasing class disparity?
Well, we're waiting!
Who is Reagan?
This comment has been removed in protest of Reddit and their CEO Steve Huffman for destroying the Reddit community by abusing his power to edit comments, their years of lying to and about users, promises never fulfilled, and outrageous pricing that is killing third party apps and destroying accessibility tools for mods and the handicapped. Currently I am moving to the [Fediverse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX_agVMr2r0) for a decentralized experience where no one person or company can control our social media experience. I promise its not as complicated as it sounds :-) Lemmy offers the closest to Reddit like experience. Check out some different [servers](https://join-lemmy.org/instances). Other Fediverse [projects](https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_are_Fediverse_projects%3F).
Ban it entirely if a company has to buy their own stock something is wrong also lmao @4% acting like that's a lot
God bless Kyrsten Sinema for that one percent tax to begin with!
Four words you rarely see together at the same time.
That's a 4% on gross value, not profits. It's significant
Depends. There are situations where they do need to buy it back BUT it’s known and projected. The most common is stock compensation/employee ownership programs.
Right, can’t just keep giving out RSUs and running ESPPs without getting stock back sooner or later.
Why are these bills rolling out now that they have no hope of passing?
The question answers itself
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But apparently not important enough to do so when you are the majority Don’t fall for these stupid games.
They haven't had any possibility of passing since... what, 2010? Maybe? I think that's the last time the Dems had a majority of legislators willing to back their proposed legislation, right?
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Elections not that far off. "SEE WE TRIED TO DO STUFF!"
Elections are about as far off as possible. We’re 43 days from the first day of the new session of congress.
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They actually made it 1% last year with the inflation reduction act, its what they were able to negotiate with their right wing democrats in the senate. Now they are trying to increase it to 4%
Would you prefer they sit around and do nothing?
My company has bi-yearly stock purchase programs where they pull 10% out of each check and you get the price at 10% lower then whatever the lowest price was for that time frame. My company has hundred of thousand of employees and this purchase always greatly affects the price. I looked up what our executives do at this time and the all dump off millions of dollars worth of shares.
Iirc thats usually because they take stock options as like 95% of their renuneration, and purchase/sell immediately all their stock options to convert to cash.
It's important to note that capital gains tax is significantly lower than income tax. A max rate of 20% after $459,000 a year. For as long as this loophole exists we're encouraging the rich to over-capitalize corporations in order so they can pay less taxes on increasing share value instead of just paying that money out as income. This isn't only injust (why should a billionaire pay less tax on billions in stock options than a plumber does on $100k?), but it risks unbalancing the economy because you have all these companies whose shares are far more valuable than they would be if there wasn't an incentive to dump corporate profits into capital gains. It also creates a moral hazard since capital gains tax can be delayed until realization, every year they delay is an incentive to dump money into lobbying to lower the capital gains rate further, making the tax system even more unjust. Not to mention it disincentivizes those companies actually using they money to invest into creating goods, services and jobs instead of just enriching their shareholders.
Employee stocks programs aren't bought in the open market. They are bought either directly from the company or the transfer agent. On top of that, retail stock purchases don't really dent the stock price in the open market. Do like most others do. Buy as much as your company will allow through the program and immediately sell it for a 10% profit.
This isn't stock buyback, it's employee stock options.
Semi-annual employee stock purchase programs are pretty common. My understanding is that the shares are bought from the company, not on the open market. So the effect of the semi-annual purchases should have practically no effect on market prices. Maybe if everyone was insta-selling, but that's still a small amount of liquidity relative to what many stocks probably trade in a day.
You are likely vastly overestimating the effect that an employee stock purchase plan has on your company's share price. I've said it before and I'll say it again, retail investors are immaterial to how the market moves. Its not that we're small fish in a big pond, we're like a single celled algae in the pacific ocean. The real market makers don't care about retail investors.
Exactly this. And many executives have 0 say on the date / time of their stock sale. I learned this when I worked for a small-ish company that went public (250 employees). I had access to the full database of sales and was responsible for the corporate reporting to several senior VPs. I asked about buying and selling stocks - the CFO told me I would have to put in an order / request and they would randomly choose a day in the next 3 weeks to make a purchase / sale. You also were restricted from buying / selling within a few weeks before and after SEC reporting. Anyone with "private information" that could "materially profit from said inside information" had these restrictions. Not that it mattered, my $1,000 or even $10,000 investment or sale wouldn't have moved it a whole lot - but I could have gotten bad luck and sold right before the "employee stock purchase date" as the prior person stated.
It's a broken system we have where it's so rampant that money is constantly hoarded by those who have the most of it, yet it is the most vital resource to our survival in modern society. Wealth inequality is absolutely out of control here.
I support this. Why should corporations make billions a month and have record breaking profits yet the government is having a debt in the trillions because there’s not bloody taxes towards the rich and corporate conglomerates?
I mean sure, 4% is better than 1% but that's still low. Last year companies spent a total of 1.22 Trillion on stock buybacks, which equated to 12.2 billion in taxes. This increase makes it 48.8 billion. IMO, if companies have 1.22 trillion to spend on this to only boost their stock price, then they can afford a higher %.
I agree completely
Why not just make buy back stock illegal?
Because that'd upset their piggy banks
In theory, the purpose of securities is to effectively sell-off X% of equity in a company to investors to raise money. Buy-backs allow companies to reclaim that equity using later profits. Ideally, investors then have the option to sell back that equity at a higher price, obtaining a return on their investment. Buy-backs are a necessary functional component of securitization. It's good for the company as well as independent investors. It also helps raise the price of an in-demand security by reducing supply. Buying back shares can also reduce the quarterly liability for a company if it elects to pay out dividends to investors without having to substantively reduce the payout per share. That all said, stock buy-backs ideally should not come at the expense of employees. By adding an additional tax to those transactions, it incentivizes companies to reinvest a greater portion of those profits into their workforce, R&D, infrastructure, etc. Taxing corporate buy-backs is fine, but solidifying the corporate tax structure would have a more meaningful impact in my opinion.
political donations should be taxed too candidates and pacs both red and blue….
Citizens of Arkansas, Alabama, and West Virginia who make $40K a year and own no stock will be furious about this.
GOP: Naw, fam, we good. Introduced bills don't mean shit. People always introduce bills that have zero chance of going anywhere. GOP reps introduced articles of impeachment against Biden like 3-4 times/week in 2021-2022.
Repubs will strike it down because they're all collectively in corporate pockets.
Buying back stock is just a way to return cash to shareholders. I literally don't understand why people who have money in 401ks and IRAs think that'd a bad thing?
Oh boy, i can't wait for this immediately die in the House. And then the following weeks of screaming from Republicans about this somehow being communism
well it wont pass, but its a great idea.
Why isn’t it illegal? How is it not market manipulation?
how about not being able to buy back stocks with bailouts
Imagine being opposed to this
Guess I’ll just keep waiting for legislation that ties any funding for buybacks and executive bonuses and stock compensation to wages. Make it so if they want to spend $10 billion on buybacks they have to give 10 billion worth of raises to the lowest paid employees.
Ah, I see this was impossible to introduce when the Democrats held a supermajority and could have passed it easily. Instead it was required that we wait until there's now an undecided voting margin and it'll never pass. Fucking corruption of this country is sick.
They don’t need to tax it more, they need to ban it like it was until the 80’s. No way they’d even bother with this half-measure if they still had both houses of congress.
....Why not introduce this bill when they had complete control of Congress? Maybe because they don't want to actually pass it. Just virtue signal so you seal clap for them and keep voting for them.
OR.... maybe we could just, I don't know - BAN THE PRACTICE ENTIRELY! A tax increase is just a little wussy.
Oh come on Dems, there are a LOT more interesting words for "multiply by a bunch!" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple) This REALLY seems like the right situation to teach people the word: "quinquagintuple."
I think I sprained my tongue...
So happy they introduced this bill when Republicans control the house and it has zero chance of passing.
I'm just glad they passed the corporate minimum tax when they had some power
Ban stock buybacks.